Mary is the Mother of the growing Church

The title ‘Mary, Mother of the Church’ has been accepted and particularly celebrated since the publication of chapter 8 of Lumen Gentium [Vatican II], but it can be even more explicit if we affirm that Mary is ‘Mother of the growing Church’. 

Indeed, Mary's role in her maternal mission does not stop at the historical dimension of her responsibility towards the Son of the Most High, whom she conceived, bore and educated through the action of the Holy Spirit. Her maternity of grace continues as she conceives Christ in the hearts of new disciples. She thus participates spiritually and truly in the maternal life of the growing Church. 

This reflection on Mary Mother of the growing Church leads us to reconsider the Church's relationship with the world, which has too often been understood in a too exclusively dialectical way, saying that either the Church should flee this dark world, or should exhaust herself to try to transform it.

This vision of growth and begetting urges us to see things more accurately and more deeply. Father Michel Corbon reminds us: 

“The Church is not only in the world, locally and temporally. In truth, it is the world that is in the Church, as in the womb where it is in gestation until it is born, transfigured, into the Kingdom. It is in this positive, hope-filled sense that we must understand the cry of the Church, which comes to us from the first Christian generations: “Let this world pass away, and let your grace come!” (1)

The Church's relationship with the world is not one of confusion or opposition, but of gestation (Rom 8). Evangelization and the new evangelization cannot be conceived without this vision of the Church as the body of Christ, born and reborn in the love and fire of the Holy Spirit for the Glory of the Father.

Father Mario Saint-Pierre, Marie, Mère de l'Église en croissance (2009) 

(1) Michel Corbon, Cela s'appelle l'aurore. Homélies liturgiques, Éditions des Béatitudes (2004)